Amazon's Drone Announcement Is About Normalizing An Enormous Societal Disruption

Will Burns
, ContributorWill Burns is an advertising veteran and current CEO of Ideasicle.com.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Unless you're living under the floorboards of a Post Office, you've likely heard about Amazon's recent "launch" of their vision for drone deliveries on this 60 Minutessegment. It's getting a lot of buzz, to be sure, and most analysts and writers believe that short-term buzz was Amazon's primary objective. But I believe it's just one small piece of a much larger, more thoughtful, and possibly brilliant longer-term marketing-plan from Amazon.

While the timing of the 60 Minutes interview was certainly calculated to maximize exposure at this critical holiday buying time, I believe that was a secondary convenience. Bezos' true motivation was to start the process of normalizing this wildly-disruptive delivery mechanism between now and when it actually launches (optimistic view is five years).

But before I get into why, here's a product demo of what Amazon is calling the "Amazon Prime Air":

Drone delivery is not your everyday disruption.

Bezos says that Amazon is on its 7th generation of fulfillment centers. The public never heard much about those seven evolutions because they were all invisible, all back-end optimizations, all techy algorithmic stuff. Amazon's service kept getting better in the form of faster delivery times, but consumers didn't know (or care) why. And Bezos didn't make a big deal out of any of these previous evolutions. He just did them.

But drone delivery is a different kind of evolution. It's visibly and behaviorally disruptive. And, as a marketer, Bezos wisely sees the need to start softening up the consumer market well in advance of these devices even being legal. Because he likely understands that there will be several critical phases to the public's ultimate adoption of this technology, and each phase will take time.

Drones. From death to delivery.

Let's start with the public's current perception of a drone at all. The word "drone" is intimately tied to death, destruction, war, and terrorism. Drones are well known as killing devices, not happy little delivery devices. As such, Amazon is starting in negative territory from a perception standpoint.

It will take time to shift our perception of a drone from "death" to "delivery." And Bezos knows it.

Not just a retail disruption, but a societal disruption.

Let's say people ultimately understand that not all drones are killing machines. Then consumers need to get their heads around the societal practicality of this new reality. Packages are flying in from the sky? Will the drone hit me or my kids in the head while we're playing frisbee in the front yard (Bezos jokes about this possibility in the 60 Minutes segment)? Will there be drones all over the sky crashing into each other? Will it be taking pictures of me or of my house?

Drones delivering packages is a wild new reality. People will need to be absolutely convinced that nothing can go wrong. It will take massive PR exposing the successes of early adopters, but just as much PR exposing the failures, exactly why the failures happened, and what Amazon is doing to fix the problems. Over time, our confidence in the concept will increase.

But this practicality phase will be a long process and Bezos knows that, too.

It's about time.

What Bezos has done here that is so genius from a marketing standpoint is this: he's started the debate now, before he's even perfected the octocopter technology and before it's even legal, so that the public will start the long process of self-normalizing the concept of an octocopter in the first place.

He knows that the technology is not only disruptive, but so visibly disruptive that waiting for the technology to be ready and launching an expensive advertising blitz making flat promises won't cut it. Bezos knows it will take time, not advertising, to normalize this disruption.

Look no further than Bezos' response to a question from Charlie Rose about whether he cared about short-term financial returns,

I care, but I’m willing for it to be five, six, seven years. So just that change in timeline can be a very big competitive advantage.

Yes, time can be a competitive advantage. And it's cheaper for Amazon to let the media start normalizing this concept now than it would be for Amazon to advertise their way through it later.

In fact, the real value of this first step in Bezos plan will not be realized this holiday shopping season. The real value won't take hold for five years or so. By then after years of debate and discourse about drone deliveries, we consumers will be far less afraid of this disruptive technology.

No, by then consumers will be like, when the hell is Amazon going to finally start that drone delivery program?